There were various attempts to develop an organic phonetic writing system for Chinese, like hiragana for Japanese, for example Bopomofo (still used in Taiwan) and General Chinese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Chinese). The Simplified characters that you see on the mainland today were originally part of a multi-phase scheme to eventually replace characters altogether, but the second phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...) was bungled so badly that it didn't continue. In practice Pinyin is the standard phonetic writing now and is used when people can't remember a character.

> how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but especially evident in computing)

We are not in the 90s anymore. UTF-8 has been around for 32 years now. If you’re working for a system that has no UTF-8 support, you have a much bigger problem to worry about.

> characters have no direct relation to phonetics

Most characters are phono-semantic where one part of the character is a phonetic hint and the other is a semantic hint.

> modernize it similar to Hiragana

Hiragana isn’t and wasn’t intended to replace kanji (unless you are from the fringe Kanamozikai). It serves a different grammatical purpose and is complementary to the other two. Kana is useful for an agglutinating language like Japanese, but not Chinese languages.

> Kana is useful for an agglutinating language like Japanese, but not Chinese languages.

FWIW, the Japanese did develop a kana-based system for Taiwanese during the occupation, but it was an abomination.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana

I think one of statements with respect to CJK languages that has to be made more often is that each of the languages has own numerous dialects with dubious mutual intelligibilities, e.g. Tsugaru and Kagoshima dialects against standard Japanese.

The phrase "a language is a dialect with an army" often appears in topic of Asian languages, and causing frictions between CJK non-speakers wondering about compatibilities between the three and speakers showing near vile dissents to those questions. While I understand both sides of these sentiments, the situation is not ideal for both sides.

IMO, it might be weird to refer to these languages as "Beijing Tokyo Seoul" languages, but doing so occasionally(just occasionally) could create more tangible feel as to why these three seem to exist side by side so utterly disconnected against each others.

I'm guessing you are not familiar with how Chinese characters work nor how Japanese Hiragana or Kanji work.

This is not a helpful comment.

Well obviously not. Posting a dumb question tends to return some very helpful responses

> one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics

nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of homophones or near-homophones, so this approach works reasonably well as a memory aid once you've memorized a bunch of the basic characters.

One problem is that many of the pronunciations have drifted from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the words. Also, some of them have been simplified in Simplified Chinese which makes the components a bit harder to discern.

I've been learning some Cantonese recently and this is very apparent with certain common Cantonese words. For example, the first-person pronoun in Cantonese is pronounced ngo, with a low-rising tone, and written like this:

我 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1/

The word for goose in Cantonese is also "ngo", but with a different tone. Here's the character for that:

鵝 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1200...

If you enlarge it, you'll see that the left side is the same 我 from before. The right side is 鳥, which means "bird" (https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/161/). So if you saw this character and knew the basic characters for the pronouns and the word "bird", and you spoke Cantonese, you'd be able to easily understand what it meant.

Here's another one. The word "ngo" with still a different tone means "hungry". How do we write it?

餓: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/740/

In this one the phonetic component is on the right instead, which is a bit inconsistent. The left side is this:

食: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/116/

What does 食 mean? It's the verb "to eat". So if you saw this 餓 character and knew a couple of other basic characters, you could figure out that it's the word "ngo6" meaning "hungry". Many of the characters still work like this although the sound shift I mentioned above means that some work in some Chinese languages and not others.

Native Cantonese speaker here, glad that you are interested in learning Cantonese.

I am working with other volunteers to improve Cantonese teaching, and wonder what difficulties you have encountered when learning Cantonese, and what materials or communities would be helpful for Cantonese learners.

> why not just adopt Japanese

Because Japanese characters have no direct relation to Chinese phonetics. Both belong to different dialect continuums, phonetics aren't compatible.

And I suspect same might explain lack of native Chinese phonetic script; `Chinese` isn't a single spoken language, but what is called as such is its Beijing area version of one of Chinese(or Sinitic) languages. The written language was universally understood in China due to bureaucratic needs, but AIUI it's not same as spoken language and it's not necessarily used everywhere. Maybe they just had little uses for a standardized phonetic script?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese

It is still very useful to standardize the pronunciations, since people with different dialects had to meet especially those officials in government. There was “yayan” for this purpose.

https://en.wikimedia.org/wiki/Yayan

There are a lot of underlying assumptions here:

1. That Chinese writing is inherently inefficient. It's actually very efficient...to read. And nothing beats the efficiency of having a script that maps perfectly to the language. Also as sibling comment notes, UTF-8 is a thing.

2. That there is no relation between written characters and phonetics. Incorrect, as several sibling comments point out.

3. That Japanese kana represents a successful "modernization" of kanji that Chinese should emulate.

4. That Chinese is "basically kanji" - assuming the Chinese and Japanese languages are essentially interchangeable. They...are not. I can't even begin to emphasize how much they are not. Chinese is subject-verb-object while Japanese is subject-object-verb, for instance. Chinese also has many phonemes that are incompatible with Japanese, which would not be covered in hiragana. Finally, kanji came from Chinese and has subtle differences and while it is mostly a subset of Chinese hanz, it has its own slightly different character set

It’s really bizarre to see someone claim kana has anything to do with “modernization”. The Japanese modernization and industrialization period is famously associated with translating Western concepts and terminologies into Sinitic words that later spread to China, Korea and Vietnam.

That was true like 100 years ago, but nowadays katakana words are extremely popular and increasingly used over their Sinitic counterparts, so I feel it's a valid argument.

Also it's not uncommon for words like ろ過（濾過）to be written in part kanji especially in news... if that trend continues beyond the 常用 kanji we might end up with a Japanese that is closer to Korean.

The modernization argument only makes sense if your society is economically or militarily inferior to the society you want to emulate. It was the case 100 years ago, but not today.

The Japanese economy has been stagnant for over 30 years with no end in sight. Following the same logic, Japan should perhaps “modernize” their language by following China, which is a ridiculous conclusion as you can tell.

GP is making understandable misunderstanding due to how the three Far East countries are presented in the world at large, that there are three countries in Asia that practically touches each others, just like Germany is with Belgium and Netherlands in Europe.

Tokyo from Beijing(2000km/1200mi) is about as far out as Paris to Kyiv. Far East countries are also separated by seas, like Mediterranean countries across the sea. I doubt a lot of Parisians have meaningful ideas of "basically Latin" Ukrainian any way or form, or Italians with Tunisian, but there's such false instinct that forms out of above-mentioned presentation that those Asians are rather next door neighbors.

That and mistaking personal difficulties and inefficiencies associated with understanding languages in non-native manners as inferiority of the foreign one.

Non-native speakers who suggest that countries arbitrarily modernize or change their language remind me of non-musicians who come around with a new replacement for traditional sheet music. Even if it was a good idea, which in this case it's patently not, it's just not gonna happen.

It's a failure to recognize that languages (which I would rank music a kind of) evolve organically, and outside of some edge cases, like Esperanto, they're not artificially created in a vacuum.

See https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...